One trend I noticed in the second half of this year is game companies trying to sell season passes to players. A season pass means the player pays in advance for a bundle of downloadable content (DLC), basically a paid-for version of content patches for single-player games. And such a season pass isn't cheap, those for Borderlands 2 and Assassin's Creed 3 cost 30 Euro each, the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 season pass even costs 50 Euro on Steam.

The thing that bothers me is that to price a season pass the game company basically needs to have the DLC already produced when the game is released. There have been cases where a so-called "DLC" wasn't actually downloadable content but was in fact already burned onto the DVD on which the game was delivered. What happens is that players end up paying full price for half a game, and are then asked to pay full price a second time for the other half of the game.

Game companies like DLC because it acts as a copy protection: Even if you can sell the game used, the DLC is legally treated as an account-bound service which isn't resellable. And I would be happy with the principle if a game company would sell me a game with limited content for a much reduced price, and I could then decide later whether I wanted to pay full price for a full game. But paying full price twice to get all the content that has already been planned and produced from the start sounds like a ripoff to me.